Call for papers

The deadline for submissions is 17 January 2027.

Background

Since the 1970s, the terms "center" and "periphery" have provided scholars across disciplines with a powerful vocabulary for describing hierarchical structures. Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory (1974) employed these concepts to analyze global economic disparities, mapping how wealth and power concentrated in core regions while extracting resources from peripheral ones. Franco Moretti (2000) applied the center-periphery model to the global literary field, tracing how literary forms originate in metropolitan cores and travel – often transformed – to peripheral regions. In postcolonial theory, these terms became critical tools for addressing power dynamics between colonial powers and colonized territories, as exemplified by The Empire Writes Back (1989), which examines how postcolonial literatures subvert dominant colonial discourses.

Contemporary research continues to document phenomena that validate center-periphery dynamics. Some urban studies demonstrate that large cities foster greater cultural diversity and complexity, incubate innovation, enable rapid information transmission, and cultivate more liberal and progressive populations than their rural counterparts. Yet the assumed link between urban scale and cultural complexity is not straightforward: evolutionary modeling and cross-cultural anthropological data suggest that population size is not a reliable predictor of cultural complexity across subsistence types, and that environmental conditions can outweigh demographic factors entirely (Fogarty and Creanza 2017). Moreover, the seemingly descriptive dichotomy between center and periphery is rarely neutral. Implicit in the terminology itself lies a hierarchy: centers represent development, complexity, and cultural production, while peripheries signify their absence or diminishment (Keith and Pile 1997).

This power asymmetry extends beyond conceptual framing to shape research practice itself. Scholarship gravitates toward centers, where archives are richer, sources better preserved, documentation more systematic, and institutional resources more abundant (Schich et al. 2014). Peripheral spaces, communities, and voices often leave fewer traceable records, creating profound gaps in our understanding of cultural life beyond metropolitan boundaries (Trouillot 1995). These archival imbalances are not accidental but reflect historical patterns of institutional investment, literacy, preservation priorities, and whose stories were deemed worth recording (Robbins 2013).

Computational methods offer new possibilities for addressing these gaps. Large-scale digitization projects, data-driven approaches, and computational analysis can help recover marginalized voices, trace patterns invisible in traditional archives, and make visible what has been systematically overlooked (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020). Yet computational humanities itself risks reproducing center-periphery dynamics: digitization efforts concentrate on major collections, and algorithmic approaches can embed the biases of their training data (Rissam 2018).

Themed issue description

This themed issue invites contributions that use computational methods to study peripheries, not only in relation to dominant centers, but as spaces, positions, and perspectives in their own right.

We welcome work that examines peripheral positions defined by geography, social status, cultural influence, institutional access, linguistic marginalization, or other forms of exclusion.

We are particularly interested in scholarship that reflects critically on how computational methods can help trace, recover, or reconsider what has been placed – or has emerged – at the margins, as well as work that interrogates how these methods might inadvertently reinforce hierarchies (Piper et al. 2024).

Topics of interest

Topics may include:

• Computational approaches to peripheral authors, communities, regions, or languages;
• Studies of cultural diversity across center-periphery divides;
• Analysis of circulation networks and knowledge transmission;
• Recovery of underrepresented voices in digital collections;
• Critical examination of bias in training data and algorithmic approaches;
• Methodological reflections on doing computational humanities research with fragmentary or non-standard sources.

We welcome submissions from across the humanities, including history, literature, archaeology, linguistics, art history, media studies and cultural studies, as well as from computer and data scientists, social scientists, and scholars in related fields working on humanities questions.

Article types

Authors can choose from several different article types for their contribution to this themed issue - see the Preparing your materials page for the full list of article types available.

If the article type selected is marked as 'by invitation/enquiry only', authors should contact the Guest Editors with a pre-submission enquiry.

Submission process

All submissions should be made via the CHR online peer review system. Authors should consult the journal’s Authors instructions prior to submission.

Please note that all submissions should include links to associated data, code, or materials, whenever possible, and will be reviewed with attention to the transparency and reusability of their methods.

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Contacts 

If you have questions about this themed issue, please reach out to the Guest Editors:

• Alie Lassche (University of Antwerp, Belgium): alie.lassche@uantwerpen.be
• Tim Tangherlini (University of California - Berkeley, USA): tango@berkeley.edu

For any questions relating to editorial policy or the submission process, please contact the journal’s Editorial Office at chr@cambridge.org.

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References

• Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. 1989. 2nd ed. Repr. New Accents. Routledge, 2001.
•  Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
• D'Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.
• Fogarty, Laurel, and Nicole Creanza. “The Niche Construction of Cultural Complexity: Interactions between Innovations, Population Size and the Environment”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 372, no. 1735 (2017): 20160428. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0428.
• Guarini, Elena Fasano. “Center and Periphery.” The Journal of Modern History 67 (1995): S74–96.
• Henrich, Joseph. “Demography and Cultural Evolution: How Adaptive Cultural Processes Can Produce Maladaptive Losses—The Tasmanian Case.” 
• American Antiquity 69, no. 2 (2004): 197–214. https://doi.org/10.2307/4128416.
• Keith, Michael, and Steven Pile, eds. Geographies of Resistance. Routledge, 1997.
• Kyloušek, Petr. “What Is the Center and What Is the Periphery?”. In Centers and Peripheries in Romance Language Literatures in the Americas and Africa. Brill, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004691131_003.
• Luca, Davide, Javier Terrero-Davila, Jonas Stein, and Neil Lee. “Progressive Cities: Urban–Rural Polarisation of Social Values and Economic Development around the World.” Urban Studies 60, no. 12 (2023): 2329–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221148388.
• Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature”. New Left Review, n.s. no. 1 (2000): 54–68.
• Piper, Andrew, Richard Jean So, and David Bamman. “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Computational University?”. Critical Inquiry 50, no. 4 (2024): 657–82.
• Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018.
• Robbins, Katherine J. ‘Balancing the Scales: Exploring the Variable Effects of Collection Bias on Data Collected by the Portable Antiquities Scheme’. Landscapes 14, no. 1 (2013): 54–72. https://doi.org/10.1179/1466203513Z.0000000006.
• Schich, Maximilian, Chaoming Song, Yong-Yeol Ahn, Alexander Mirsky, Mauro Martino, Albert-László Barabási, and Dirk Helbing. “A network framework of cultural history.” Science 345, no. 6196 (2014): 558-562.
• So, Richard Jean, and Hoyt Long. “Network Analysis and the Sociology of Modernism.” boundary 2 40, no. 2 (2013): 147–82. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2151839.
• Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
• Vicinanza, Paul, Amir Goldberg, and Sameer B Srivastava. ‘A Deep-Learning Model of Prescient Ideas Demonstrates That They Emerge from the Periphery’. PNAS Nexus 2, no. 1 (2023): pgac275. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac275.
• Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Studies in Social Discontinuity. New York: Academic Press, 1974.